History
For centuries, a community of Spanish-speaking Yucatec Mayas lived off the radar of civilization in a village called San Jose, in the remote Yalbac hills (Belize Maya Forest) of rural Orange Walk district.In the early 1930s the Belize Estate and Produce Company (BEC) began a series of campaigns to forcibly remove villagers, claiming that the land was now private company property. The lacking evidence of the company’s alleged ownership of the land enabled villagers to resist the pressure to relocate, but in 1936 the force and ferocity of the campaigns strengthened, and slowly families started drifting away from the village in search of new homes.
There were around 30 families for whom the idea of upheaval and removal from their native village was too strong, however, and these people remained determined to save their village even after all realistic hope had faded. The company was powerful, politically and financially, whereas the village had always provided for itself and rarely even entered local discourse, making it entirely undervalued as a settlement. It seemed the government even doubted the longstanding history of the village, rather assuming it to be a recent settlement made up of migrant arrivals from neighbouring Central American countries.
The powerful BEC eventually won the battle, and the residents were forcibly removed from their homes with promises of assistance, land and property at their final destination in exchange for decent levels of cooperation with the authorities. The villagers were first sent into Gallon Jug on foot, from where they caught the logwood train to Hillbank, and finally they were put on a barge designed for raw materials and floated downstream into Orange Walk Town, arriving at the Barcadilla before being herded towards the Barracks.
The ensuing weeks of being cramped at the Barracks while final preparations were made for their ‘new home’, were times filled with distress, disease and death of the villagers, which made the men unite and decide to transform their parcel of land themselves, rather than continue waiting in vain for the fruitless promises of BEC and the colonial government.
This parcel of land forms the modern-day village of San Jose Nuevo Palmar, formed into an almost triangular shape bordered by the Belize Road, the southerly stretch of the Orange Walk bypass (opened in 2004), and the creek that separates the village from the neighbouring Louisiana area of town.
The establishment of the village occurred during the summer months of 1936, and by the beginning of October of that same year, villagers had provided sufficient facilities in order to move into the village on a permanent basis.
From a village that was forcibly contained within an area of bushland with no services or facilities for a community, San Jose Nuevo grew into the envy of many nearby villages, through the sheer hard work and determination of its residents. People grouped together to build houses, one by one, catering to the needs of every family in the village; people cleared land to extend picados to improve access within the village; people built a bridge across the creek to extend the infrastructure of Orange Walk town.
In the early days, San Jose Viejo was incredibly developed in its level of communication with the outside world: several books that came from the original settlement still boast international library stamps from elsewhere in America. The fact that villagers chose to carry these books with them on their hazardous journey to their new settlement reveals a commitment to education and respect for literacy.
By 1946, the community worked together to build a wooden school in order to educate their village youth within their own confines. A few months later, the school opened, catering to the needs of 25 village children. Until it was accredited by the Ministry of Education, the school’s teacher was paid a salary that was collectively saved by the community.
Similar values and determination were seen when the local group La Preservacion Maya formed in 2004, with the specific intention of preserving San Jose Nuevo’s ethnic heritage by promoting indigenous foods, customs and dances at the Fiesta del Pueblo, which has since become a widely celebrated annual event.
The strength and authority of the elders have been somewhat criticized by authorities because the initial land titles, ordered by the Queen and granted to the village Alcalde, remain enforced to this day. Thus leases and land titles are strictly controlled by the elders of the village, and on various occasions in the past when government authorities have tried to reclaim control of the land distribution process, they have been confronted and defeated by the vociferous community voice of San Jose Nuevo.